Building Swanson: A RAG-Enhanced Recommendation System for whatisonthe.tv

Background reading: This article builds on Building whatisonthe.tv with FastAPI, which covers the core architecture, async patterns, and caching strategies used in the application. Since October last year, I've been logging everything I watch on whatisonthe.tv. The check-in feature has been working well, and I now have a solid history of viewing habits. But there was a problem I kept running into: finding something to watch with my mum. The Problem When I'm at my mum's house, half the battle is finding something we can both enjoy. She's not into anything too dark or violent. I'm not keen on anything too slow. Our overlap is narrower than you'd think, and scrolling through streaming services together rarely ends well. I had the data. Months of check-ins, tagged with who I watched with, when, and what we thought. What I didn't have was a way to use that data intelligently. So I built Swanson. What is Swanson? Swanson is a RAG-enhanced chatbot that sits inside whatisonthe.tv. Named after